The Trump administration has cut funding and staffing at the program that oversees the federal government’s premier report on how global warming is affecting the country, raising concerns among scientists that the assessment is now in jeopardy.

Congress requires the federal government to produce the report, formally known as the National Climate Assessment, every four years. It analyzes the effects of rising temperatures on human health, agriculture, energy production, water resources, transportation and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and city governments, as well as private companies, to prepare for global warming.

The climate assessment is overseen by the Global Change Research Program, a federal group established by Congress in 1990 that is supported by NASA and coordinates efforts among 14 federal agencies, the Smithsonian Institution and hundreds of outside scientists to produce the report.

On Tuesday, NASA issued stop-work orders on two separate contracts with ICF International, a consulting firm that had been supplying most of the technical support and staffing for the Global Change Research Program. ICF had originally signed a five-year contract in 2021 worth more than $33 million and provided around two dozen staff members who worked on the program with federal employees detailed from other agencies.

Without ICF’s support, scientists said, it is unclear how the assessment can move forward.

“It’s hard to see how they’re going to put out a National Climate Assessment now,” said Donald Wuebbles, a professor in the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois who has been involved in past climate assessments. But, he added, “it is still mandated by Congress.”

In a statement, a NASA spokeswoman said that the agency was “streamlining its contract providing technical, analytical and programmatic support for the U.S. Global Change Research Program” to align with President Trump’s executive orders. She added that NASA planned to work with the White House to figure out “how best to support the congressionally mandated program while also increasing efficiencies across the 14 agencies and advisory committee supporting this effort.”

The contract cancellation came a day after The Daily Wire, a conservative news website, reported on ICF’s central role in helping to produce the National Climate Assessment in an article titled “Meet the Government Consultants Raking in Millions to Spread Climate Doom.”

ICF did not respond to a request for comment. The cancellation was first reported by Politico.

Many climate scientists were already expecting that the next National Climate Assessment, due in 2027 or 2028, was very likely in trouble.

Mr. Trump has long dismissed climate change as a hoax. And Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote before the election that the next president should “reshape” the Global Change Research Program, since its scientific reports on climate change were often used as the basis for environmental lawsuits that constrained federal government actions.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration tried, but failed, to derail the National Climate Assessment. When the 2018 report came out, concluding that global warming posed an imminent and dire threat, the administration made it public the day after Thanksgiving in an apparent attempt to minimize attention.

“We fully anticipated this,” said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at the Tulane School of Architecture who was an author of a chapter of the National Climate Assessment on how climate change affects human-made structures. “Things were already in a very dubious state,” he said.

The climate assessment is typically compiled by scientists around the country who volunteer to write the report. It then goes through several rounds of review by 14 federal agencies, as well as public comments. The government does not pay the scientists themselves, but it does pay for the coordination work.

In February, scientists had submitted a detailed outline of the next assessment to the White House for an initial review. But that review has been on hold, and the agency comment period has been postponed.

Ladd Keith, an associate professor at the University of Arizona specializing in extreme heat governance and urban planning, had been helping to write the chapter on the U.S. Southwest. He said that while outside scientists were able to conduct research on their own, much of the value of the report came from the federal government’s involvement.

“The strength of the National Climate Assessment is that it goes through this detailed review by all the federal agencies and the public,” Dr. Keith said. “That’s what makes it different from just a bunch of academics getting together and doing a report. There are already lots of those.”

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said the assessment was essential for understanding how climate change would affect daily life in the United States.

“It takes that global issue and brings it closer to us,” Dr. Hayhoe said. “If I care about food or water or transportation or insurance or my health, this is what climate change means to me if I live in the Southwest or the Great Plains. That’s the value.”

Austyn Gaffney and Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.

The battle of billionaires in space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is ready to enter a new arena: satellite internet. But the contest will have to wait another day as weather along Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday night interfered with a launch attempt.

Amazon, the company that Mr. Bezos started as an online bookseller three decades ago, is now a merchandising behemoth, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic gadgets like Echo smart speakers and one of the most powerful providers of cloud computing.

So perhaps it is not a surprise that Amazon is now launching the first few of thousands of satellites known as Project Kuiper to provide another option for remaining connected in the modern world. The market for beaming high-speed internet to the ground from orbit is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, which operates a similar service, Starlink. Starlink, with thousands of satellites in orbit and more launching nearly every week, already serves several million customers around the world.

Why was the launch postponed?

The first 27 Project Kuiper satellites were scheduled to lift off on Wednesday between 7 and 9 p.m. Eastern time from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They were to fly on an Atlas V, a rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. U.L.A.

But the flight attempt was dogged by poor weather near the launch site, with rain, wind and cloudy conditions making a liftoff unsafe. After pushing back the launch time several times during the two-hour window, U.L.A.’s flight director decided to scrub the flight around 8:41 p.m.

The company is reviewing the next opportunity for a launch.

What is Project Kuiper?

Project Kuiper will be a constellation of internet satellites intended to provide high-speed data connections to almost every point on Earth. Doing this successfully will require thousands of satellites, and Amazon’s goal is to operate more than 3,200 in the years to come.

The company will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, a service that was originally marketed primarily to residential customers.

While Kuiper also aims for that market, particularly in remote areas, it will also be integrated with Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing offering, which is popular with large corporations and governments around the world. That might make it more attractive to businesses that involve satellite imagery or weather forecasting that not only need to move large amounts of data across the internet, but also to perform calculations on the data.

Ground stations will connect the Kuiper satellites to the web services infrastructure in a manner that could also allow companies to communicate with their own remote equipment. For example, Amazon has suggested that energy companies could use Kuiper to monitor and control remote wind farms or offshore drilling platforms.

In October 2023, two prototype Kuiper satellites were launched to test the technology. Amazon said that the tests were successful. Those prototypes were never meant to serve in the operational constellation, and after seven months they were nudged back into the atmosphere, where they burned up. The company said it has since updated the designs of “every system and subsystem on board.”

“There’s a big difference between launching two satellites and launching 3,000 satellites,” said Rajeev Badyal, an Amazon executive in charge of Kuiper, in a promotional video ahead of the launch.

When will Amazon provide internet service from space?

Amazon told the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that service would begin after it had deployed its first 578 satellites. The company has said that it expects to connect customers to the internet later this year.

While a fully functional constellation needs thousands of satellites, the company can offer service in specific regions with far fewer in orbit before expanding to more global coverage later on.

The F.C.C.’s approval of the constellation came with a requirement that at least half the satellites needed to be deployed by July 30, 2026. Industry analysts say the company could get an extension if it has demonstrated substantial progress by then.

Getting the satellites into orbit also depends on rocket launches occurring on schedule, which can be a problem if enough rockets are not available. Amazon also needs to build hundreds of ground stations, to relay their signals to users.